Whatever modder told you that this is all you need to do to make a game work in coop mode is sadly mistaken.

It's an oversimplification for the purposes of a non-technical forum. Each and every client does not have to do the same, and all of, the processing in order to derive a consistent result across multiple players.

Sponge, the Life AI was the single biggest reason for the games delay (according to GSC). Not for nuthin' but I tend to beleive that had it been as simple as you claim it would've been done for Clear Sky since it was overwhelmingly the most requested feature for the series. As it is they're not even considering it.

I may be wrong, I'm not a programmer but I elect to beleive the devs over a bunch of hostile forum posters who really haven't made many salient technical points on why it would be such a snap to do.

DrEvil, however, IS a programmer, an AI programmer at that, and has coded several excellent bots for a few different games.

What he says is 100% correct. The other clients don't have to give a shit about their buzzword AI. They only need to know the AI's direction, the speed, and what animation to play. This is a little exaggerated, but to the coop clients, it's just like having another client in a multiplayer game.

To parallel it to human players, when you play UT3, or whatever, does your client have to know what the other players see, what their graphics settings are, what their ping is, etc? No, the client does the processing, sends it to the server, and just sends back what the other clients need to know.

With a coop game, does each client need to know what the AI is thinking? No, they just need to know where the AI is and what it's physically doing.

I don't doubt they have reasonable limitations for not including coop, but the above reason is a marketing-droid speak for "LOOK HOW COMPLEX WE ARE" and you're falling for it hook, line, and sinker.

In terms of AI complexity, without seeing the source myself, I would say that deathmatch bots and STALKER's AI are about the same level of complexity, but in two different direcitons. Bots like in UT3, ETQW are simulating a human player, while STALKER's AI is simulating an 'actor' in the STALKER world. Both goals are very tough goals to achieve.

I believe it can be impossible to do Co-op in stalker, simply because of lag. you have input and outputs the game needs to update between clients, and dependent upon the number of actors and factors that can easily be an amount of data that exceeds what you can do with Ethernet. We are talking about syncing a system that reasonably responsive in ram thats has response times in nanoseconds to something that has response times in miliseconds is a major slowdown.

So STALKER needs fast RAM and low latency, where other games don't? Are you trying to tell me that STALKER is so poorly coded it can not manage something that every realtime network multiplayer game ever created has done?

And what "factors" are there exactly that can't be broken down to heading, velocity, and animation? Be specific if you're trying to deem something as impossible. I don't think you realize just how much bandwidth 100megabits, or 1 gigabit on many home networks truly is.

Ok, for you people that can not put two and two together. He is saying, that the AI that is in STALKER wont work with coop because the AI is random for each computer. Doom and all these games you are talking about, doesnt use this AI system(LIFE SIMILATION) Ok, we have it now? Guys I own this bridge in broklyn, anyone interested?

This is patently absurd, and false to boot. Please don't speak of issues that you do not know about. You've simply been suckered in by the fancy talking buzzwords.

Tell me, how do bots play Quake, UT, ET/ET:QW differently every time? What about Crysis AI reacting differently depending on surroundings (or sometimes falling into the water? Or are you going to tell me that that was intentional, planned, and not random?)

There is nothing special about STALKER's AI that makes it impossible to do coop. More likely, they just don't wish to take what could be a significant amount of time to get it running well.

[edit] Point me to some sort of academic papers that explain this AI system that you claim nothing else has. After all, if it's really a concept, and not just something that they made up on the spot, there will be research on the subject. I suspect you can't, simply because there isn't any.

Regarding co-op: I think what he's saying it would be impossible because of the AI life system which is autonomous (I hope I'm using that word correctly) from the game it would be impossible for two or more players to experience the same game their co-op mates would be experiencing. IE; he would be attacked by dogs and die....you would just see him fall over dead for no reason.

What AI is not autonomous? I don't take any direct action on what any given entity does in the world-- we're past simple action/respose style AI. The problem you present, a player being attacked by dogs on one screen for instance, but not the other, is very easily solved, and the concept of which is the basis of every multiplayer game since Doom-- synchronizing the gameworld between multiple clients.

Think about bots in any modern multiplayer game, from BF to Quake3. They operate under the rules of the game world, with their own random 'will' and not off some predetermined set of actions. The game state is simply synchronized across any clients.

While the above statement seems like a huge load of bullplop (although it's possible there are engine problems, and that is simply a dumbed down answer for non-programmers to get) at it's face value, there's nothing unique to their "life simulator" that can't or hasn't been worked past in other titles.

I suspect there is simply too much bandwidth required for coop to be feasible over the net. Rather than take the time to do a LAN only mode, or implementing some sort of client-side prediction like most MP-heavy games feature, they're just not bothering entirely.

This really drives home the sad fact that pc gaming is slowly dying out.

I would say this drives home the fact that PC gamers aren't satisfied with shitty graphics tech demos like Crysis, and are urging for more like Portal. You don't see many articles sad about Valve's sales there.

Q4 was built on the Doom3 engine. Doom3/Prey/Q4 are all one in the same now. If you license the engine you get the features/updates from all of them.

If you license the engine *now* you do. However, when ET:QW first started development in 2003, it was the Doom3 engine. If you poke around in the source you'll see some references to MegaTexture, and one of the programmers.

It's a Quake 4 engine-specific bug. Prey was one of the first games I loaded up when I installed my 8800GT, and was puzzled at my constant 20FPS in it at the same settingss as I had on my 7900GT. Then remembered this irritating bug.

Prey and ET:QW are built on top of the Doom3 engine though, and not Q4. It must be something in either Doom3, or higher than that.

Uh, being the third edition of Unreal Tournament (on the PC anyway) which for the most part is just like the last two only with better graphics how could you be surprised at how the game plays?

Despite that, people still think that every new game is going to be some retarded psuedo-realistic slowbie game like CoD4, and throw a sissy fit everytime a new game comes out that doesn't fit the dumbed down gameplay.

How is this game cheating-wise?I've heard of wall-hacks and targeting-hacks.I'd like to know before I plunge in

There's nothing unique about CoD4 that will cause it to attract more or less cheaters. The game is relatively new, so PunkBuster will catch most of the public cheats, but it will become more widespread as private hacks get released.